The following is a comment made by Sienna Miller, whilst giving evidence to The Leveson inquiry

“For a number of years I was relentlessly pursued by 10 to 15 men, almost daily… Spat at, verbally abused… I would often find myself, at the age of 21, at midnight, running down a dark street on my own with 10 men chasing me. And the fact they had cameras in their hands made that legal.”

This is the last project of this course, a course that I started in July last year (2011). I have been able to complete it sooner than I thought due to the fact that in the last few months I have been able to work full-time on the various projects and exercises.

I have been asked to produce a collection of images on a theme of my choice, these images will hopefully show the viewer that over the last few months I have been able to improve the quality of the pictures that I am taking. They should also show an improvement in the following areas:-

Workflow including editing

Digital Image Quality

Processing the Images-taking images in Raw file, colour and tone and monochrome

The use of Photoshop and other computer programmes after the images have been taken.

I also took into account the following areas from my first course, The Art of Photography:-

Contrast

Framing and cropping

Applying the techniques of illustration and narrative.

My Project

In a way this project was chosen for me, following a request to attend a training course and capture images showing the work of the Royal Navy Search and Rescue crews.

The final images would be used in the following ways:-

Training Aids.

Advertisement and publicity.

As personal images for the crews involved.

A final images , professionally mounted to be presented as a thank you gift.

Of course I could have turned down the request, I could see that there would be difficulties and issues that I would have to overcome. The UK armed services demand and expect professionalism , there would be no second chances to capture the images.

What I wanted to show

The interaction of the crew members.

The difficult flying conditions.

An insight into the type of work that the crew carry out.

The images were to be taken during a live exercise in what could be poor weather conditions, both on land and on water.

My equipment was checked the night before the exercise and extra memory cards had been purchased. There would be limited space for equipment so I was unable to take a laptop. In view of this a portable hard-drive was purchased so I would have back-up images stored.

I took two lenses:-

Nikon 24-70 F2.8

Nikon 70-200 F2.8 together with a TC 20E 2 X teleconverter.

The final images would have to be mounted and ready for presentation. The images below are the images that I have chosen, the mounted images will be slightly different as I chose different sized mounts to present the work.

Image 1

Image 1

Image 2

Image 2

Image 3

Image 3

Image 4

Image 4

Image 5

Image 5

Image 6

Image 6

Image 7

Image 7

Image 8

Image 8

Image 9

Image 9

Image 10

Image 10

How did the project turn out?

I think that I was very lucky that the request for the images arrived at the same time as I was coming to the end of the course. I had access to areas that members of the public would not normally have. The pilots were flying in very difficult conditions and I had very little contact with them. It would have been nice to have a chat with them to see if there were any particular images that they wanted.

Some of the images were shot in very difficult circumstances , the downdraft front the rota-blades as times nearly blew me over. I had to strap the camera to the side of a ship in order to get the shots that I wanted.

Am I pleased with the Images?

Looking at the images one at a time I would make the following observations.

Image 1

An opening shot showing the aircraft a Westland Sea King HU5 with the winch-man underneath. This image and image two have been mounted together.

Image 2

A close-up of the two crew members, I have converted the aircraft to monochrome and kept the winch-man in colour. I like the contrast between the orange flight suit and the helicopter.

There is a section of blue over the winch-man’s right leg that is a bit of a let down.

Image 3

An image of the aircraft that shows the movement in the rota-blades. I had to take a number of shots at different speeds in order to get the movement in the rear rotor-blade. Mounted pillar-box style taking care that the sea was level.

Image 4

A close up image of one of the pilots, There is a great contrast between the black and white Ace of Spades playing cars and the red cab. Shallow depth of field was used to remove the distractions in the back-ground.

Image 5

A close up image of the crew looking out of the aircraft. You can see the look of concentration on one of the guys faces. I like the contrast with the winch-man who’s face you can not see.

To me this is a nice clear shot in focus.

Image 6 and Image 7

Two images showing winching, on reflection they are a little too similar. Both mounted so that there was less deck on display.

Image 8

As the aircraft turns to fly away I captured this image of the winch-man as he enters the door. Mounted so the rotor-blades are in the top left and right corners of the picture. The Royal Navy is also clearly shown. I also like the heat signature coming from the engines. I have also removed the green sign and the Portacabin on the deck of the ship as they are a distraction.

Image 9

This image is one of my favourites. It shows three different things

The aircraft

The winch-man

The boat.

The sea looks great and there is great contrast between it and the orange suit. There is movement , a degree of excitement and interest in this image. The eye is drawn down from the aircraft via the winch wire to the winch-man and he is pointing to the rib. Mounted with the rib in the bottom right corner. A good all round action shot, especially for the winch-man.

Image 10

A final image that has had a serious amount of Photoshop work done to it.

1. Turned into monochrome.

2. Winch-man and RAF target turned back into colour.

3. Cropped and mounted pillar-box style.

Looking at the finished image, I would have liked to have captured a little more of the tail-rotor and maybe I should have converted some of the cab back to red. What do you think?

Am I pleased with the final results?

I am pleased with the results that I managed to end up with . I am not ashamed to admit that there was a certain amount of pressure to get results, especially taking into account the customer!! Some of the images are better that others but I think that they are sharp and the colours are good. They are hopefully interesting and do give a small insight into the work of the flight crew.

What would I do differently?

I would have tried to contact the crew to get close-up images of their flight kits, hands and faces to give the images a more personal touch.

I ended up with a lot of images on a portable hard-drive that were not filed as good as they could have been, this caused me a lot of extra work during the editing process.

As I stated earlier I have mounted the images and will send them to my tutor, Mr Taylor, in the mounts. This will show him what the final images will look like.

I have been working on a web gallery for some time so this exercise gave me the push I needed to add some images and update the Look of the website.

I wanted the website to be simple, understated and easy to use. I did not want lots of banners and adverts. I chose the name GJCIMAGES and purchased the name from Go Daddy, a website building service.

You add the images and the computer helps you to set out the pages.

Go Daddy

I picked some of my and favourite images to add to the site so people can see what my pictures are like. I have not at this stage filled out the About me page due to un-related matters. I also added a contact me page so people can email me.

The course notes suggest the following:-

What is the purpose of the website?

Images must come first.

Keep it simple.

Offer a limited number of clicks. (My wife agreed with this, she hates complicated websites)

Make it searchable.

Get other people’s opinion.

Here is a screen shot of the Home Page. (The images move across the screen)

Home Page

19 medium-sized images roll across the screen, If an image is selected it is automatically enlarged. I picked the smaller images first so that they load and move quickly across the screen.

How were the images chosen?

Colour Images

Black and white images.

Some showing that they had been altered in Photoshop.

Landscape Images

Studio/Portrait.

General Images.

I would hope that the selected images would give the viewer a good selection to look from.

Each image was sharpened for Internet use (I did this after completing the sharpening exercise!) and cropped to give a nice tight view.

Does the website show my best images? Hopefully yes, is the website simple to use with few distractions? Again , yes.

I will now let as many friends know about the website and see what they think.

So far this course has been very interesting. I have had to research and look at topics that I have never had to look at before. This exercise is a case in point. So what is sharpening and why do we do it?

Well after looking at “The Photoshop Elements 8 Book by Yearby and Kloskowski I discovered the following:-

Most images will need to have some degree of sharpening.

Sharpening helps images that are not 100% in focus

Sharpening gets back some of the original crispness that is lost in processing.

You can sharpen your images in Photoshop.

And this rather interesting quote from the book “I’ve never met a digital camera or scanned photo that didn’t need a little sharpening.” Is this really the case?

Looking at the on-screen help in Photoshop , Sharpening normally makes use of the “Unsharp Mask”. It contains 3 values:-

Amount, the strength of the effect.

Radius, the size, in pixels, of the effect.

Threshold, the protection of smoother areas, such as sky or skin.

I then started to look at the exercise in detail it suggested a using a portrait image. I had to make adjustments to the sharpness of the original image at 3 different levels then print the four images off. Once printed I had to compare the three sharpened images against the original to see what differences I found.

Here is my original image

Chosen Image

As I had not done any sharpening before I suspected that I would not be able to tell the difference between the original image and a sharpened one, especially on say skin tone. In view of this I looked closely at the image looking for an area that I hoped would make the results clearer. I saw that her clothing may have enough detail to show me what the difference would be.

Here is my first test sharpening, the amount of sharpening was suggested , by the author, as a general amount for most images.

First Test

I really was impressed with the result of the first test the difference in the jumper fabric and the black lines on the blouse really stand out. It’s not until you put the two images next to each other that you notice the difference.

Again using the suggested settings in the above book I made three copies of the image with different degrees of sharpening.

Suggested for Portrait

Suggested for Portrait

All Purpose

All purpose

Moderate

Moderate

Here are the three images together to assist the viewer.

Portrait-top, All Purpose-middle, Moderate-bottom

You can see from the above poster that there is a significant difference between the three images. The all-purpose image is clearly not up to standard and is over-sharpened in my view. I do not like the moderate image and in this particular case I do think that the portrait image is the best.

After the images had come back from Photobox I checked the screen settings on our iMac , it was set to Adobe RGB 1998.

I then positioned each of the images around the screen and checked each one against the original image (at 100% magnification).

Well after looking at the printed images with the aid of a newly purchased magnifying glass I can make the following observations:-

The overall result of which degree of sharpening produces the best image is the same for both on-screen and printed images. However I think this may be because of the vast difference between the three images. Would this change if:-

The resolution of the screen was different.

The quality of the screen.

The images were printed on different quality paper.

The settings used by Photobox to print the images, even though I used their quality control tool to check each of the images reached the minimum standard.

Of particular note is how skin is effected by the sharpening. The first comparison test I did (see first test image above) resulted in a great improvement in the texture /look of the fabrics. However the opposite seems to be true of skin, the pores in the skin become more evident and this, in my view, gives for a rather disappointing result. This is definitely one area where I will have to be careful in the future if I start sharpening portraits. The safeguard is that the on-screen images gives a reasonable indication as to what the printed image will turn out like.

This has been another useful exercise as I have had to explore a topic that I had not looked at before.

My camera is still away getting serviced so I am completing this Assignment using pictures that I have already taken a few months ago with this topic in mind. I had to travel up to London to get many of the shots.

The object of this assignment is to produce a series of images to illustrate a magazine.

I saw the notes on this assignment a few months ago when the course notes first arrived and I have been looking forward to it. I have never designed a magazine cover before. I looked back at the book I had to design for my last course. The first draft of the book I completed was submitted and my tutor , Mr Taylor, sent me a few tips on how to improve it. He said that my second attempt was much better so I decided to work along the same lines.

I did not realise until I did a little research that Photoshop can help you design a book/magazine. I also looked at a few examples of other students work to see what they had done.

It seemed that I could either take some images and change the cover of an existing magazine or make one up from scratch.

I decided to make one up from scratch, I wanted my magazine to standout from the others on the shelf so I set about taking images that would interest the reader.

So what does a magazine have to look like? I thought the bast way to find out was to buy a couple and have a look on-line.

Here is a magazine from the web.

copyright What Digital Camera

So looking at the above example I need my magazine to have:-

Bold Colours

Nice background image to set the page

Show what’s inside.

Date of publication

Price\barcode

So I set about making my own magazine, I chose to do an in-house magazine for the Police Federation, in London.

Firstly I got the blank template from Photoshop:-

template

Then I added my background image which I had to do a little work on:-

Background

I then reduced the opacity to 45% so I could add the title and the other stories. I wanted to use as many of my own images as I could to make the cover.

Next I had to get the title, I needed it to be bold, to stand out and to mean something to the readers.

Blues and twos

Blues and twos as all emergency service people is what the sirens are called!

Next I had to add a further title so people, who did not know what Blues and twos are,would know who the magazine was for.

Starting to take shape

You can see on the bottom of the screen shot the other images that I am going to use. (The picture of HM The Queen and the London Olympic Sign are from the internet)

The Date and the bar code have been added. We can also see some of the inside stories are now appearing so readers will know what to expect.

Bottom Right Corner

The image of the police bike was original facing the other way, however I discovered that the bottom right corner is very important, as it’s the last thing you see before you turn the front cover over. Images also look better if they are facing right.

I wanted something in the bottom corner that would catch the reader’s eye, so I thought it had to be details about a free gift or something that people would find interesting and want to turn the page over to have a look.

I then sent the proof images of my front cover to a friend for some comments, he sent me an email making some suggestions, which I have added to the front cover. I also wanted to add a crest to give the magazine a bit more authority. Again I set it into the front cover like a watermark.

Getting Close Now To Publication!!

I think that the crest in the background fills in the space nicely , but does not distract from the background image.

Here is the final Cover:-

Well what skills have I used in creating this magazine?

Taking the original images, after I thought of the magazine front cover.

Researching what a magazine front cover needs to look like.

Cropping images.

Cutting and pasting.

Re-scaling.

manipulation of images (turning the motorcycle around).

Reducing opacity of an image to set it as the background instead of using a plain white one.

Using various tools in Photoshop to create text, resizing and changing its location on the screen/cover.

Realising that you may need to get an image from a third-party in order to complete your work, i.e. getting an image from the internet if you can not/have not got a image that you need.

Researching an image for copy right.

I have really enjoyed this assignment, it has taken over 10 hours over two days to research and complete. On top of this I had to go to London to get some of the images.

It will be interesting to see if viewers think it looks like a real magazine?

I got my feedback from my tutor, Mr Taylor, yesterday for my 2nd assessment of this course. Here is a small part of the detailed report that he sent me.

“Overall, I must firstly congratulate you on persisting in the Lake District when the light and weather conditions were not very encouraging: you have produced some good images. However, these same conditions have not been good at providing examples of high contrast lighting. Although High Contrast 1, 2, 3 and 4 are all good pictures, they do not really show high contrast situations.”

In view of his comments I have looked at the images that I had submitted and have added the following photographs that I will submit for formal assessment later in the year.

High Contrast

The original image was of a water fall, Mr Taylor commented as follows:-

“The waterfall itself does rather dominate the frame and I suggest that a wider angle or different viewpoint may have been better, to encompass more of the rocks and surroundings.”